Sage today announced that Sage Live, its cloud-based, integrated accounting solution is now available in South Africa. Tailored to the needs of growing companies, Sage Live supports ambitious organisations that are scaling up for growth.

Sage Live brings together finance, sales, CRM and operational data to provide businesses with a powerful, single view of their business. Built on the Salesforce platform, it enables Small & Medium Businesses to run completely in the cloud and control complex operations, eliminate low-value tasks and respond more quickly to customers. They can also connect with thousands of third party apps via the Salesforce AppExchange, giving them exactly what they need to help them run their business.

Sage Live offers business tools and office collaboration via Chatter – the integrated social media tool that enables employees to do more, anytime anywhere. Employees can share knowledge, files and data, and connect with experts from across your organization regardless of their role or location. For example, if an employee needs to alert a colleague to sign off a purchase order or to process an important order, they can do so without switching from the accounting or CRM software to a collaboration platform or sending an email.

With real-time dashboards, forecasting and automatic reports, Sage Live supports any midmarket company that needs to manage a multidimensional organisation with multiple team projects, business units, geographies, products, clients, currencies and more.

Sage Live allows customers to run their businesses from anywhere with total usability across smartphones, tablets and other supported devices, ensuring all team members have access to the data they need, when they need it. Here are some key features:

• World-class cloud and mobile accounting. With real time dashboards, forecasting, automatic reports and multi-dimensional capabilities, updates on the business’s performance can be viewed across any device or platform.

• Simplified management of multiple businesses. Sage Live allows businesses to manage multiple companies or business locations from a single interface with features like inter-company transfers in one transaction. Sage Live helps businesses to grow beyond their boundaries with multi-language, multi-currency and multi-legislation capabilities.

• Powerful and touchless bank accounts management. Automated bank feeds and a bank reconciliation engine bring together key business data to give complete visibility, current and projected, of cash position.

Sandra Crous (Swanepoel), vice president for Midmarket Africa & Middle East at Sage said: “Entrepreneurs don’t go into business to manage taxes and admin, so we’re striving to make these tasks invisible. Sage Live gives businesses one source of information across front office and back office and across multiple countries and dimensions to create "one office". Now, entrepreneurs, accountants and employees can view their information in real-time and work as one team.”

Sage customer and entrepreneur Donal De Poer, CEO of Veltig, recently updated his business systems and made the move to the cloud. Making use of a selection of apps available on the AppExchange, he said: “The combination of Salesforce, Kimble and Sage Live has given the entire team a 360- degree real-time view of our service delivery, project profitability, and pipeline.”